24.02.2021New Seminar Series: Decentering Urban Climate Finance

New Seminar Series: Decentering Urban Climate Finance

The SoKu research group on Urban Climate Finance has been granted an Urban Studies Foundation Seminar Series Award as the Lead Institution for the organization of a new seminar series on the variety of ‘ordinary’ climate finance practices in cities around the world. In cooperation with the University of Durham’s Geography Department and the Urban Institute in Sheffield, Hanna Hilbrandt and Fritz-Julius Grafe will host an international event at GIUZ next spring. The series is titled "Decentering urban climate finance: Relational comparison in theory and practice". It engages the shifting dynamic within the unfolding ecological crisis, where financial agendas centering on the ‘global fight against climate change’ have increasingly turned to cities and urban re/development projects as ideal candidates for investment. This turn has generated a proliferation of finance-driven resilience, retrofitting and decarbonisation projects around the world. Yet research documenting the resulting financialisation of urban climate and nature remains primarily concerned with cities in which consolidated financial markets are already the norm, or with case studies that conceptualise ‘climate finance’ in relatively narrow terms (frequently, financial instruments created by market actors for the express purpose of 'impact' investing). This seminar series aims to provincialise these imagined geographies of climate finance and to decenter notions of the ‘financial’, advancing a relational theorisation of ‘ordinary’ urban climate finance: the heterogeneous financial practices and articulations that are coming to characterise climate finance (Robin and Castán Broto, 2020) in ordinary cities (Robinson 2006).

More information is available at: urbanstudiesfoundation.org/